Several years ago Matt Bailey was contracted by the state of Pennsylvania as part of a massive effort by then Governor Rendell to update every state website to meet Section 508 accessibility standards. I was brought in by Matt to perform a layer of usability testing, and assist with accessibility. I met Matt many years before that while we were both SEO’s. He is known all over the world as a speaker, writer and trainer on internet marketing, SEO, and accessibility. Having been interviewed by him before, Matt noticed that I have been writing more about the rise in ADA lawsuits and related accessibility topics. We caught up again to discuss accessibility, inclusive design and the importance of making sure…

In the U.S., apart from federal, state, and local government websites which must meet Section 508 regulations, there are no enforceable ADA legal standards to follow for website accessibility. However, just because there is no straightforward set of legal requirements for website accessibility does not mean that your business will not be presented with a lawsuit. This has understandably raised alarm. Fortunately, there are standards in place that unifies development and allows the world to use web-based solutions with universally accepted protocols. We know these standards as the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C. Accessibility guidelines are known as WCAG. As of 2018, we are at version 2.1. (Both WCAG and Section 508 guidelines were updated in 2018.) In the U.S.A.,…

I have struggled to pinpoint the pivotal moment when I became passionate about website usability and accessibility. It wasn’t my path. The company I worked for in the year 2000 was a hot internet sensation in its day, churning out hundreds of websites in various verticals. Its stock prices hovered at $300 a share. Employees literally lined aisles and walls and were packed into several floors like sardines hooked up to desktop computers set up on shelves with barely enough elbow room between each person. I was lucky enough to be in a department where the user interface engineers had mammoth size monitors and actual desks to work at. The only other woman was from Russia and a JAVA developer,…

Somewhere in my pile of web junk, countless desktops, laptops, tablets and Kindles later, is a picture of me using my first PC in the kitchen of my old townhouse. My parents and the guy who would later become my husband (for which I had NO idea at the time that was in my future!), were standing behind me. I must have been showing them how I would unplug the house landline, dial up AOL with the 9600 baud modem, screech and cringe at the noise until AOL connected me to the world and then I could email or work on my first website, called Dancing Thunder’s Playground. It was 1995. I was surrounded by books on HTML, PERL and…